[I don’t write reviews, but I do like to point out things that worked well in games I’ve enjoyed.] Open Sorcery, from Abigail Corfman, is a mobile-app-wrapped Twine game where you play a sentient magical defence system. Twine was built to support branching narratives.Classic branching narratives without any game-hybrid elements are a bundle of special-case IF/ELSE Read more

[I don’t write reviews, but I do like to point out things that worked well in games I’ve enjoyed.] The Fall is a side-scrolling point-and-click adventure from indie studio Over the Moon. You play the onboard intelligence of a power armour suit with an unconscious passenger, exploring a derelict installation populated by deranged machine intelligences. Read more

I’ve finished off my guest writing gig for Paradox on Stellaris. I’ve written a couple of blog posts about it: one at the beginning, one at the end. People have been asking if I’ll do any more. The answer is I’d totally be up for it, if Paradox asks and if it fits my schedule (I imagine Paradox Read more

When I sold Failbetter, and went freelance, I said I wanted to learn about and experiment with different ways of approaching interactive narrative. So far, this is going well – I have a piece in the works for Choice of Games, I’ve written guest content for Paradox on Stellaris, and I’m building my own narrative-crafting hybrid experiment. Read more

I’m winding up a wagon-load of work on Paradox’s Stellaris. This is about what I wrote, and what I learnt while I was writing it. Paradox gave me a very open brief, but stories of unwise trespass and cosmic horror are what I’m known for – and that’s what I saw people anticipating in the comments here. So I’ve gone full-on Read more

Anyone who has ever considered writing for a living will have heard Opinions about the Passive Voice. At the very least, they will be vaguely aware that the passive voice is considered sordid or sinister. I think it is pretty sinister, actually. Look how I just used the passive ‘is considered’ to shrug the belief off on Read more

Oh, man, I love starting blog posts with a bit of arrant poncery. Buckle up. This is the opening to an Isaiah Berlin essay. (I originally wrote ‘an Irving Berling essay’, but fortunately corrected it before I exposed myself to lasting Internet ridicule.) “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus Read more

That Iain Banks quote – ‘the unlimited special effects budget [that] written SF hands a writer’. Man, I’ve never felt that so keenly. I keep being, like, is it okay if I blow that up? and the Paradox guys are all, sure, put a black hole in while you’re at it. But there are constraints, Read more

I wrote this fairly sympathetic piece about No Man’s Sky. It got a lot of comments, many of them from angry people who wanted me to agree that SEAN MURRAY LIED, and now #gamergate has found me on Twitter. I don’t want to get into any kind of Twitter argument. I do want to say some Read more

I’ve patched Cultist Simulator! These are the headlines: * Once you’ve started recruiting followers, they can lose interest if you’re too sane. Conversely, if you’re too obviously deranged, your group will attract the attention of an Inspector. * Inspectors occasionally arrest people until dealt with. Right now you can just send followers to Sort Them Out; I’d Read more